Title : The Complete Guide to Saving Seeds: 322 Vegetables, Herbs, Fruits, Flowers, Trees, and Shrubs
Author : Robert Cough
Publisher : Storey Publishing, LLC; Illustrated edition (July 1, 2011)
Language : English
Volume : 320 pages
ISBN-10 : 1603425748
ISBN-13 : 978-1603425742
WELCOME TO THE DYNAMIC and wonderful world of seeds. Nature has excelled at saving seeds for millions of years, but improving upon natural systems is part of human nature. We have done well by probing the mysteries of seeds, learning how to harvest and store them and coax them to germinate and grow abundantly to suit our needs.
A bit more than 10,000 years ago, humankind learned that saving seeds and planting them in specially prepared gardens meant that we no longer had to wander through muddy slime in warm Mediterranean swamps to gather celery, nor did we have to stalk wild cabbages along the cold and windy Baltic coast. Thanks to sojourning pioneers who plied ancient trade routes and returned to Europe with seeds of a strange new tree, we no longer had to live in Kazakhstan to enjoy wild apples.
Seed saving and agriculture birthed civilizations. By planting seeds, humans could more easily enjoy more types of food in greater quantity, which left them more leisure time for developing art and astronomy, music and mathematics. Early gardeners quickly began to understand that if they sowed seeds of, for example, spinach, each plant that sprouted displayed a slight variation in the traits of its parent, while still conserving the overall attributes of spinach. The gardeners observed variations on a theme, so to speak, noticing a few plants with a more tender or larger leaf, while some other plants were more or less robust than the rest. These first generations of seed savers kept the seeds only from the best plants and destroyed plants with less desirable traits (a process called rogueing). Through the hundreds of generations of gardeners and horticulturists that followed, modern seed-saving techniques were refined and ambitious plant-breeding programs flourished. Thus, in the course of only a few thousand years, our collective seed-saving endeavors have accomplished what nature, working far more slowly, would have taken millions of years to accomplish through evolution.
Sowing seeds that you’ve collected from your own plants offers exciting new possibilities for your gardening endeavors.
Table of Contents:
THE SEED-SAVING REVIVAL
Those Amazing Seeds
Why Bother Saving Seeds?
How to Use This Book
PART 1: Saving Seeds: The Basics & Beyond
CHAPTER 1: SEED BIOLOGY 101
Flowers Come First
Pollination
Fruit and Seed Development
CHAPTER 2: GROWING PLANTS FOR SEEDS
Super Spacing for Seed Production
Preventing Unwanted Pollination
Hand Pollination
Selecting Your Seed-Stock Plants
Special Handling for Biennials
CHAPTER 3: HARVESTING AND CLEANING SEEDS
Know What You’re Harvesting
Timing the Harvest Just Right
Extracting and Cleaning Seeds
CHAPTER 4: SEED-STORAGE KNOW-HOW
How Long Do Seeds Last?
Getting the Moisture Right
Getting the Temperature Right
Getting the Temperature Right
Good Places to Store Seeds
Summing Up Storage Recommendations
CHAPTER 5: ALL ABOUT GERMINATION
Nature’s Exquisite Logic
Types of Seed Dormancy
Overcoming Seed Dormancy
Promoting Optimum Germination
The Waiting Game
CHAPTER 6: SOWING SEEDS AND RAISING TRANSPLANTS
Heat-Treating Seeds
Direct Seeding
Raising Transplants
Hardening Off
Setting Out Transplants
Creating a Nursery Bed
CHAPTER 7: BREEDING YOUR OWN VARIETIES
Plant-Breeding Basics
Breeding Hybrids
PART 2: The Handbook: From Vegetables to Nuts
CHAPTER 8: SAVING VEGETABLE SEEDS
CHAPTER 9: SAVING HERB SEEDS
CHAPTER 10: SAVING FLOWER SEEDS
CHAPTER 11: ADVANCED SEED SAVING: NUTS, FRUITS & WOODY ORNAMENTALS
APPENDIX
A History of Seed Saving and Selling in North America
Glossary
Resources
Acknowledgments
Index